


The Length of Time

by CaffeinaShips



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Dean at the end, Friendship, Gen, maybe implied romance, stories from Castiel's life before the Winchesters
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-19
Updated: 2020-01-19
Packaged: 2021-02-27 08:07:41
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,315
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22313773
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CaffeinaShips/pseuds/CaffeinaShips
Summary: A few events from Castiel's existence pre-Winchester. Castiel considers what humans have given him.
Relationships: Castiel/Dean Winchester
Comments: 10
Kudos: 12
Collections: SPNColdestHits





	The Length of Time

There was once a man who lived for a very long time; perhaps three thousand years, or perhaps a thousand million years, maybe a trillion or so, depending on how the scientists look at it.

A black cloud drifted by, a mottled mass of hydrogen, a black cloud of hydrogen, with the definite characteristic of being black. The Angels didn’t call it black, the Angels called it existence. It was all there was and all that anyone had known. Perhaps God had known more, but he was uncommunicative with his creations, and Angels had yet to invent questioning God.

The hydrogen was pooling far above the rock of the earth, and mixing with other elements, swirling and growing bigger. God was inventing again. The Angels had no opinions on this because the Angels had yet to discover opinions. 

The moon was low in the sky, as though it had been shipped in from the farthest reaches of the solar system. Which it had been some hours before. It hung there unassumingly, slowly making its way around the rock of a planet. The Angels had no opinion about the addition of a moon. And now God seemed to be building something new, something huge. The Angels watched because what God was doing was all there was.

The sun rose slowly, like a mighty black cat, and then sank into a state of deep sleep. The terms ‘cat’ and ‘sleep’ are terms Castiel applied to the memory in the past tense, as neither term existed at the time. No cats had been created, and no one had slept. It was a good first try. A good start. As far as anyone knew. It was the first sun any Angel had ever seen invented. 

The Sun, with its rolling shaft of bright light, the brilliant blue of the distant golden sun, and the red glow of its waning corona, was shining. The sun was achieved. Light entered the world, and with it color, and the concept of color soon followed. Light and day and night all became. The Angels had no opinion on that. Later, as time could now be easily marked by the cycling of the sun and moon, the Angels heard that God had been pleased with it, and that sounded like it was for the best.

-

The short, dirty, and dirty-looking ship that weighed three tons and was three feet in diameter landed on a desolate and green plain. It was a terrible first start. It turned out that trying to teach a family of desert people how to build an effective barge was more difficult than originally anticipated. Castiel had twice just straight up dumped the schematics into the head of the patriarch of the family. Each time the limits of his brain had warped and deleted huge chunks of the information necessary and had resulted in another aborted construction process. Castiel figured he would have to stand at the man’s shoulder and whisper instructions to him step by step during the entire process.

He had a strange name, and he was a very big boy indeed. No one had been named Noah before. His mother had invented the name. Humans were always inventing things. At six foot tall Noah towered over the other humans. The humans had invented the idea of having opinions, and so Castiel tried the new idea and decided to form an opinion of humans. The were… cumbersome. Too smart to settle into a steady place in the world, too dumb to realize that they were individually meaningless. Too dumb to build a boat without tedious amounts of help. Just smart enough to think that their ideas had merit, too stupid to realize that very few of their ideas actually had merit at all. 

The praying mules on the top of the hills sounded the final klaxon, lifting their spiked front hoofs as they crept the last few feet of desert landscape past the crest of the enormous swathe of prehistoric sand. Castiel was reminded that once the boat was complete he would have to coax Noah into collecting pairs of animals. Castiel had his doubts they would get them all before the flood. The sea of stars was filled with the serenity of a million little birds. Castiel hoped they would save the birds. 

There would be a new town, a new society, a new way of being human. The village of Pembrokeshire, in the county of Mersey, lies on a wide, happy plain, which, in a few years, was to become known as the “Land of the Endless Mountains.” And sometime after that “Nepal”. Once all other humans were dead, in the desert and in the plain, the mountains would be pulled from the ground, Noah would land, and humans would begin again. 

The purple-haired woman came to the clearing in the plain, and without looking up from her book, said, “It’s too late to be thinking about baby names.” Humans had begun the habit of transferring their thoughts into words that could be transferred to paper. They’d been writing down their ideas in books. Castiel had no idea why and no opinion about books. 

This human was a prophet of the lord. God had chosen her to hear his thoughts, and to convey those thoughts to the best of her very limited ability. She was pregnant and she knew it, even though other women would not have surmised at that stage. The flood was coming and she was not a member of Noah’s family. She and her unborn child would be victims with the rest of humanity. Because of her closeness to God she knew it. Castiel had no opinion on this. 

-

“I am Eilie, and I am here to kill the world.” 

He had the heart of a lion, and the fangs of a man-eater. 

“I have just been informed, that the debate over the question ‘is it right or wrong to have immortal souls’ has been finally brought to a conclusion.”

The morning sun was shining brightly, but the sky was grey and the clouds aching. There would be torrents of rain. Huge swaths of rain, and it would begin within the hour. It reminded Castiel of the clouds before the flood. But God had promised no more floods like that one, and no flood would be coming to end the creature standing in front of Castiel. That was Castiel’s job. 

There had been a handful of nephilim before the flood, and the rumor was that Angel/human relationships were part of the reason God had smote the earth and started humans again. This was the first one Castiel had ever met. The creature had grown away from Angels and from humans, mostly alone, and word was it had made him a little crazy. The word from On High was that his unchecked powers had made him crave destruction. This very strange monologue was confirming this word.

“It is wrong”

He announced this with much conviction. Castiel decided to wait patiently for the diatribe to end before killing the creature. He felt that seeming agreeable to the creature’s point would make the fight easier. He had found the creature huddled in a cave mumbling and scratching pictures of horses onto the walls of the cave with a rock. The man had ignored Castiel at first, before wandering outside to yell at the sky and at Castiel. 

“Destruction is the only means of creation, otherwise we clutter up our universe, our only space, with failed attempts. We must wipe away the failed tries that bog down Heaven and make way for new, brighter creations! Angels with their infinity of stagnation must be ended. The human soul with its endless imperfection must be ended! We must make room for new, creative ways of failing! Humans and Angels must breed together fully! We must embrace the chaos that is the hybrid, the bastard, the mutt! We must commit to ending ourselves, our progeny. We must embrace an ending! We fail all of time and space with our endless, bland, flat continued being. We owe it to the world to destroy ourselves and each other!”

He fell silent for a moment. A drop of rain fell. Castiel considered if this was his moment. Suddenly much quieter the man spoke to the sky again.

“Long, glowing tongues trailed from your mouth as you listened to what was being said across this kingdom of ours, but growing a little more somber since the week that caused us to proclaim general war.”

For the first time he turned to face Castiel and spoke to him directly.

“Brother you come to kill me. I am sad to end because I must destroy the world. The world must be destroyed. I am the first and voice and the echo of destruction. You will remember me for many millennia, and when the time comes you will know when we must end. My art shall be remembered. My voice shall be forgotten. But the amber in my eyes is timeless!”

With that he lept at Castiel ferociously. Fangs bared, uncut nails bared, as if to shred the immortality from Castiel with his bare hands. Taken aback Castiel barely had time to raise his Angel blade and stab the creature in his oversized heart. Castiel’s Angel hearing allowed him to hear it’s final beat. He could smell the individual cells change from powerhouses of effect to inert and decaying meat in seconds. To a human little could be perceived between the moment of life ending and the first moment of death, but to an Angel these minute changes could be catalogued and used as evidence of a completed task. Castiel had no opinions on the man’s ideas of Heaven or mortality.

-

The second time Castiel met a Nephilim the man was angry, hateful. He tortured humans for fun and killed (or attempted to kill) any Angel on sight. He was destruction personified. Castiel was prepared to fight the creature and die, as all Angels are prepared to die to follow an order from God, when a better opportunity presented itself. A human named David was going to take on the nephilim himself. Castiel presented the poor human with a rock. A small, unassuming rock, but a rock blessed from Heaven itself, with Angelic runes carved on all sides. A rock decorated especially for this purpose. 

Though no one would ever have agreed with him secretly Castiel had always wondered if he had inadvertently invented the concept of bullets long before humans harnessed the powders to propel them. 

The plan worked and Castiel was spared death by Goliath’s hands. Castiel had no opinion on the cunning or creativity it had taken to conceive of this plan.

-

Castiel had seen the birth of the world. He had fought every conceivable monster. He was a good soldier and a good immortal follower. He had no opinions on his existence, the existence of monsters, and had not revised his opinion on the cumbersome nature of humans either. 

-

Dean was angry. He was exhausted, hungry, thirsty, and he felt gross covered in grave mud. He was frustrated that the crappy motel they just checked into didn’t give them the typical complimentary bar of soap. He was swearing through the process of putting his boots back on to go have a word with the bored looking desk clerk, and maybe even go to a store if he had to for soap.

It was, Castiel considered, an extremely human moment. Hunger, hurt, sleep, dirt. All things Castiel had originally not thought about. Castiel had struggled with learning the value of personal space, sleep, self-care when he first met the Winchesters. They were alien concepts to Castiel, but he made himself accept them because they were important to the humans he was trying to understand. He had to learn anger, sadness, loss, fear. He had to discover joy, relaxation, comfort. It was sometimes painful work.

His time as a human had helped, a sort of immersion course. It certainly helped him gain a sense of perspective. He’d known these humans a fraction of a moment from his vantage point. They had known him a meaningful percent of their existence. It was touching that they had this little blip in time and they wanted to make space for him in it. Whenever he considered what time meant to them and then remembered that they chose him for that moment he would feel a deep sense of gratitude and awe. Humans may still often be cumbersome, but the time they share with others is a gift they have to give. It was overwhelming that they would choose to share that gift with Castiel. 

It was mind boggling what the humans had managed to achieve since they climbed down out of the trees. It wasn’t the cities that impressed Castiel, Angels could invent tools, it was the societies. The complex and ever changing ethics, the non-profit organizations, the way friends were forever trying to feed each other. Gifts. Gifts were a beautiful concept. The thoughtlessness with which one human handed another human a beer. The weird warmth Castiel would feel whenever they handed one to him. Human inventions were not of steel and glass, that was boring. Human inventions were relationships and meaning.

Dean was pulling his flannel on.

“Alright Cas, I’ll be back when that asshole desk clerk gives me a bar of soap. Do you need anything?”

The gift of consideration. The gift of caring about Castiel’s comfort. And the best gift anyone had ever given him, the gift he secretly treasured more than any possession he had ever owned. The gift of a nickname. Though it was harder than it used to be, though it took more concentration than it should have, Castiel reached out with his grace and miracled Dean a bar of soap.

**Author's Note:**

> This fic was for SPNColdesthits, like most of my fics are. If you don't know the challenge you can find it on tumblr @SPNColdestHits I highly recommend it, it's endless fun.
> 
> The challenge was to base a story off of a story starter from this list: https://aiweirdness.com/post/189170306297/how-to-begin-a-novel instead I used about a third of the list sprinkled throughout the story. 
> 
> I hope you enjoyed it despite it's weird origins.


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